Category Archives: Modern

In the present day, diagnoses for aches, pains, conditions
and illnesses are part of our individual medical history. Symptoms are
understood, in the majority of cases, as signs that lead to answers. However,
can we apply our understandings of medicine today on the perceived symptoms
experienced by those in the past?

Retrospective diagnosis is a highly debatable topic which questions ethics, religion, scientific methodology and the responsibilities of historians. This post will focus on arguments surrounding the validity of a diagnosis for historical figures and consider whether a diagnosis matters in the pursuit of history. This is important to the project as King George III has retrospectively diagnosed based on evidence from his household such as doctor’s notes, diary entries, letters and even newspaper articles where suggestions for improving the King’s diet were made.

Problems with retrospective diagnosis

One of the issues identified with
retrospective diagnosis is the absence of a practitioner-patient relationship
which allows for the first-hand observation and interpretation of symptoms.
Reports of a patient come from sources such as letters, diaries or records whose
authors may fail to recognise symptoms that would aid in contemporary diagnosis.
Symptoms that are recognised may also be described using different terminology
that could vary in meaning. Diseases, viruses in particular, change over time
so their symptoms may not remain consistent.

‘Historians have no qualms about revealing any reality, good or bad or ugly, of a historical figure’

Osamu Muramoto

Verifying a diagnosis of a historical figure is problematic as most diseases do not affect the bones. In cases where tissue is available, as with Chopin whose heart was preserved, there are other obstructions to scientific method, with arguments surrounding the preservation of peace for the deceased and respect for the people affected by the historical figure in question. Muramoto highlights that some diagnoses may be damaging or redeeming to a historical figure’s reputation. This may have a negative effect on their followers or attempt to excuse or explain away their actions.

However…

In the present day, the degree of certainty of a medical diagnosis where practitioner-patient relationship is established is not 100%. Research on the retrospective diagnosis of a historical figures is made public allowing for peer review to aid in the verification and validity of the findings.

A diagnosis can highlight the influence and impact that the disease may have had on their work or behaviours and offer new explanations. As well as adding to the historiography of an individual historical figure, it can provide a history of the disease or condition itself and can be used to create an idea of what the disease was like to live with in their period.

‘The Madness of King George’

The treatment of King George III’s illness will be discussed in a following blog of this project. Retrospective diagnosis for King George III has been based off records that were produced by his physicians. While the physicians of King George III had a practitioner-patient relationship, Joanna Edge has argued that symptoms have been chosen selectively by contemporary practitioners to suit a diagnosis.

King George III and others act as ‘windows of opportunity’ to learn more about social perceptions and medical practices of the past, so are contemporary diagnoses damaging to the interpretation of sources?

Or, by using retrospective diagnosis as a competitive theory, is it possible to use sources in innovative ways that create a broader historiography which can be verified through peer review?

Where do you stand on retrospective diagnosis? Is it a help or a hindrance? Please share your thoughts below!

If like me, living in a city means you don’t really have much garden space, so I can say I have never grown anything before in my life. But this hasn’t always been the case. From the first half of the twentieth century, orchard gardens began propping up all over England on the properties of high-status houses, sometimes owned by religious orders or noblemen. Particularly in Greater London’s county of Herefordshire, fruit orchards were easy to come across due to its excellent microclimate, which creates the perfect conditions for growing fruit. Nowadays, Herefordshire has an abundance of craft cider manufactures, like Gwatkin Cider but the county is still home to many orchards, for example, Shenley Park.

Gervase Markham (1568- 3 February 1637) was an English poet and author. Coming from a family of knights and nobles, he was largely exposed to the luxuries of the upper-class social order, making him no stranger to the operations of a household or pleasure gardens.

Markham wrote about many subjects. His works ranged from comedy, poetry, novels, and ‘how to’ books. One of his most popular works is The English Huswife.

Looking at the second part of Markham’s The English HusbandI am going to explore just how the English Husbandman crafted the perfect orchard; this will definitely come in handy if you ever inherit 50 acres or land or if, like us, you marvel at those who lived in Early Modern Europe.

Crafting Your Orchard

To begin with, you want to
seek out the sunniest, airiest section of land in your newly inherited property.
If your garden faces south, you’re in luck, you’ll have direct sunlight from
the south and west sun beaming on your property, helping the growing process.

The foundations of your orchard should look as displayed on the left. Craft a great large square, approximately 12 to 14ft, before sectioning off into four quarters. In the centre, if you’re feeling extra fancy you can add a fountained, as fashioned in the diagram, or maybe a small pond.

At this point, we’re ready to plant our fruit trees. The U.K bestselling apple is Gala apples, originally an apple of New Zealand. They grow extremely well in our climate and are profitable. Markham suggests the planting of pears and wardens (a hard cooking pear) as the next best option, and quinces and chestnuts are your third. Depending on how much fruit variety you would like, stone fruits, such as apricots, peaches etc. can be grown by the wall at the north section of your orchard.

Your orchard should aim to resemble the diagram to the right. Our smaller dots are your stone fruits, like your peaches, plums, or apricots. The centre consists of our apple trees. These are to be around 5 feet apart from one another.

Within 6 to 10 years your orchard should be flourishing. Get ready for endless plum and apple tarts!

Some tips for perfecting your orchard:

Make sure your soil is fertile.

Choose your fruit wisely. English climate is moderate, to say the least. Fruit trees, such as apples, plums, pears and cherries thrive in our mild climate. Remember, apples are delicious.

Plant your summer and winter fruits at different times. Planting them together can prove problematic; this is because as seasons change the soil moisture fluctuates, which can affect the way the fruit develops.

I have wracked my brain to think of a subject for this, my last blog post of our academic year’s involvement with Margaret Baker’s recipe book. To be honest, so close to the end of term my brain is numb and I cannot effectively put pen to paper on any one particular scholarly point of our digital recipe project. So, I thought I’d appraise the exhibition website our group has just completed. After the initial panic, denial of our technical prowess and frantic last minute virtual collaborations that threatened to crash Facebook, the subject of this blog rests upon comparison.

Before I compare and contrast the seventeenth century with the twenty first I must stress how proud we are of what we produced, how we conquered our fear of technology and found that team spirit that we were afraid would not materialise.

Our website is our ‘masterpiece’. [1] Not a pompous boast it is a reality, comparing directly with the piece of work completed by apprentices in the past. While our skills have not been seven years in the making, we, like them absorbed knowledge and skills passed on from master to student. In years to come it will be a testament to the progress we made under the watchful eye of our tutor. It will also stand as the bar upon which we can either rest, or from which we can climb even higher.

Our engagement with Dr. Lisa Smith’s Digital Recipe book project has taken us from novices to accomplished scholars. We can transcribe incomprehensible scripts;
understand concepts of empire, alchemy, chemistry and medicines contained within what at first appeared to be no more than written instruction. We can also now effectively navigate our way around early modern primary texts, reconstruct and experiment with confidence.

Our ‘masterpiece’ is comparable with Bakers Manuscript in as much as it has been a collaborative undertaking. Baker has her contributors, Lady Croon, Mistress Corbett, and through her friends, relatives and aristocratic connections we have snapshots of her life and have placed her in context. [2] We too have collaborated, forged alliances, networked and brought different skills to the table.

Like baker we have used our foremost technology; for her ‘the book’, for us ‘the website’. Yet herein lies the greatest difference between ourselves and Baker, namely our modern quest for perfection. There is no denying that digital technology has enabled the wider study of Bakers book. However, alongside what has been gained we must also look at what has been removed. From the pages of Bakers book 1675 and those of our modern website 2017, it seems to me especially that something has been ‘lost in translation.’

Both Baker and ourselves are represented on the page by our words yet it is only Baker’s thinking processes that are evident. To read Baker is to know far more about her than it is to recognise us on our website. To compensate we included an ‘about us’ page but that was a statement of what we thought the reader would like to know as opposed to them discovering us for themselves. Alternatively, to ‘find’ Baker is quite
thrilling. Despite there being a possibility of a more sophisticated edition, this her assumed workbook has an abundance of clues to follow. But our website, unless we had consciously designed it to do so reveals nothing personal about the HR650 students who compiled it.

Clear and precise if a mistake is made on a website it can be erased leaving only perfection. It does not entertain the workings of the mind, a process that is so thankfully clear in Baker. We are represented by our words but not our thought processes. Baker crosses out, makes mistakes, creates ink splodges, and leaves stains from cooking or experimentation on the page, indicative of experimentation, change of mind, a new direction to pursue, a muddled train of thought to be improved upon later.

Today, a mistake is inexcusable. Deleteable type makes it is so easy to ‘get things right’. Yet for Baker mistakes were unavoidable, ink would soak into porous ‘rag’ paper and if a large piece of text was heavily crossed through, the reverse was almost illegible.[3] For Baker mistakes or miss-thoughts were unavoidable unless she discarded her papers. This highlights emotion in her penmanship, the feelings that accompanied a clear, steady, neat and light hand were going to be different to those involved in heavy dark strokes. Even if the writing was not hers we know that by the very differences we can see.

Today by striving for uniformity and perfect presentation we have lost the personal and individual. While Intelligence and reasoning is still present in mechanically written words, character and personality is not.

In my second blogpost I argued that if Baker and I ever met I would recognise her, divided only by time. I still think that. Alternatively, if she could see our website, unadulterated by mistakes she would think me perfect and unknowable. As a concept usually reserved for God, it is reasonable to assume then that going back in time would be easier for me than coming forward would be for Margaret.

Having said that I will report that at the moment we launched our state of the art ‘masterpiece’ the cork from the celebratory champagne popped unassisted. Perhaps Baker was there in the shadows and did not need mistakes on a page to know everything about us after all.

The reading for this week’s seminar was a topic that I had not thought much about before. Just as I had never really thought about recipes and their meaning in the early modern period before I began studying this module. The topic in question is kitchens. I suppose I had thought that kitchens had always existed in the way in which we think of kitchens now. When you visit castles or stately homes there is always a kitchen where the hustle and bustle of daily life took place. The kitchen in Hampton Court is indeed huge. It was built in 1530 and was designed to feed at least 600 members of the court, entitled to eat at the palace, twice a day.

The kitchens had master cooks each with a team working for them. Annually the Tudor Court cooked 1240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 760 calves, 1,870 pigs and 53 wild boar. That is without mentioning the chickens, peacocks, pheasant and vegetables which were also on the menu.[1]

Hampton Court Kitchen plan

Interestingly, Hampton Court Palace also has a chocolate kitchen. The royal chocolate making kitchen which once catered for three Kings: William III, George I and George II is the only surviving royal chocolate kitchen in the country. Recent research has uncovered the precise location of the royal chocolate kitchen in the Baroque Palace’s Fountain Court. Having been used as a storeroom for many years, it is remarkably well preserved with many of the original fittings, including the stove, equipment and furniture still intact.[2]

Chocolate Kitchen in Hampton Court Palace

The only original 17th century kitchen to be preserved is at Ham House. In the basement there are several small rooms comprising of the kitchen, the scullery, the servants hall, a laundry, several pantries, a wet larder, a still house, a wash house and a dairy room. All these rooms would have had servants working in them and would have made the workings of the kitchen easier as it would have provided room to prepare and cook food.[3]

Original 17th Century kitchen

Of course, this is an example of a palace so what about everyday houses? Peasants in the middle ages lived in one room which served as a room for cooking, general living and eating. It consisted of a hearth stone, a fire with a pot of the top. Sara Pennell suggests in The Birth of the English Kitchen 1600-1850 that kitchens in the early 1600’s were ‘unfixed and at times contested’[4] and that it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that kitchens were ‘distinctive yet integrated spaces in the majority of households.’[5] Food could be prepared in any room with a table and could be cooked in any room with a fire. However it was the need to provide space for the works of the kitchen and other ‘food’ rooms such as pantries, larders and sculleries which reallocated eating to its own distinctive space.[6] Pennell argues that histories of the domestic interior and its evolving design neglected the kitchen and yet arguably the kitchen is and was an important room in a household. [7]

Margaret Baker never mentions in her recipes as to where the production of the recipes should take place, one just imagines that she is in her kitchen trying out the recipes (the ones which she did try) and writing them down. Of course, the fact that her kitchen would have been nothing like our kitchens today should also be taken into account if a reproduction of one of her recipes takes place. As Florence mentions in her blog, Replicate, Authenticate and Reconstruct Baker uses ‘learned knowledge’ in her recipe book. There would have been no modern oven to set to a certain temperature as they would have used a fire.

17th Century Kitchen

Evolution of the kitchen was linked to the invention of the cooking range or stove and the supply of running water. The living room began to serve as an area for social functions and became a showcase for the owners to show off their wealth. In the upper classes cooking and the kitchen were the domain of servants and the kitchen was therefore set away from the living rooms.

The kitchens of elite households were not originally in the basement. In fact basement level kitchens were almost unheard of in England before 1666. Yet by 1750 kitchens were found in the basement. One could argue this was to keep the kitchen staff out of sight of the main household and to ensure that the kitchen smells did not overwhelm the main living accommodation.

A 17th Century Distiller

So what about the medical and scientific recipes? Many kitchens or basements formed laboratories for people to experiment and write down their medical recipes. It was popular for higher class women to have stills and alembics in their kitchens for making essences. . Even the lower classes would gather herbs together and make remedies in their kitchens.

Experiments took place in many places such as coffee houses, laboratories and universities but the private residence was a popular place to experiment. Many renowned scientists used their kitchens as a ‘laboratory’ including Frederick Clod who was a physician and a ‘mystical chemist’ who used his father in law’s kitchen to experiment. [8]

It could be argued that the design of kitchens have come full circle with many people preferring to have open plan living areas which include the kitchen with people enjoying socialising whilst cooking and enjoying all those cooking smells.

British cuisine is utterly delicious. I mean who can deny a full English breakfast or a scone with Cornish clotted cream and strawberry jam with your afternoon tea? Or maybe you’d prefer a traditional Sunday dinner with all the trimmings covered in gravy followed by a banofee pie (yum!)

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that some of our British cuisine is actually not all that British as our recipes have been affected by food imports from around the world. In Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth Century Britain Troy Bickham askes ‘when a woman in Edinburgh drank a cup of tea, or a family in Bath sat down to a meal of Indian curry, did they consider the cultures they might be mimicking or how these products reached Britain?’[1] This is still true as so much of our foods are imported and most people don’t know, or care, where they are actually from.

Being a foodie myself, I absolutely love all kinds of food and love to try new dishes. However, during my year studying abroad in Hawaii I began to really miss the tastes of home! It was interesting trying to describe ‘British’ foods to the American’s I met, who couldn’t grasp the concept of a sausage roll or a Yorkshire pudding. They seemed particularly interested to learn that traditionally fish and chips are served in a newspaper! I wanted to tell them the history as there is nothing more British than fish, chips and mushy peas. So I’ve researched the famous dish to tell you all about how it came about. Can you believe that the combination of fish and chips had not been thought of before the 1860s?! And it is all thanks to Joseph Malin who opened the first fish and chip shop in 1860.[2]

Malin’s Fish and Chip Shop

Prior to the marriage of battered fish and chips, fish consumption in Britain can be dated back to the first century. However, thanks to the discovery of the New World, British people were encouraged to eat more fish as there was a ready supply of cheap cod from the North Atlantic.[3] Fish consumption is evident in recipes such as those in The Compleat Cook, a recipe book from 1694, which includes instructions for frying fish or boiling fish but there is no recipe for battered fish as we know it.

Battered fish has origins from the Jewish community in Britain. Hannah Gasse in the Art of Cookery, first published in 1747, includes a recipe to preserve fish ‘the Jews’ way’ which resulted in a dish similar to battered fish, despite the aim being only to preserve the fish. Joseph Malin, as mentioned above as being credited with opening the first fish and chip shop in Britain, was also a Jewish immigrant.

Preserving Fish the Jews’ Way.

Despite the early mentions of fish in recipe books, the spread of fried fish did not come till later, possibly due to technologically advancements. There are numerous references to fried fish in the nineteenth century, for example by Henry Mayhew, who observed and documented the working class in London, who counted between ‘250 and 350 purveyors of fried fish and claimed that this product had become available over many years.’[4]

Yet the revolution came when fried fish was combined with chips. As popularity of fried fish grew, the sale of potatoes was also developing. Fish and chip shops spread quickly across Britain. It has been estimated that by 1906 London had as many as 1,200 fish and chip shops![5]

Fish and chips increasingly became labelled as the British national dish. In 1929 a letter to the editor of the Hull Daily Mail insisted that ‘fired fish and chips are a national institution. What would thousands of people of in Hull for supper if it was not for fried fish shops?’[6] Philip Harben, one of the first TV cooks, recognised fish and chips as the national dish of Britain in his cookbook Traditional Dishes of Britain[7]publically associating food with nationality.

I was proud to tell my friends abroad about my national dish. Being away from home made me realise just how many foods are associated only with Britain. Whilst most people knew about traditional fish and chips they were completely baffled by banofee pie! But I’ll save that for another blog post.